Annalee’s writing speaks for itself. I recommend curling up with a cup of coffee and spending an infinite amount of space/time reading her incredible output, which spans more than seven years of work for Gawker Media.

I first met Annalee when she and Charlie Jane Anders co-founded io9 in 2008. I was so excited that the company was taking on science fiction and fantastical topics that I volunteered to do anything for io9, anything at all. At the time, io9 was just Annalee and Charlie Jane, and they were based on the west coast. Every night they would queue up posts for the morning, but they needed to make sure they were running during EST hours. So Annalee let me look in on the io9 feed to check that it was operational, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the highlight of my day.

Since then, Annalee helped make io9 into the place to go to read about science fiction, fantasy, pop culture, and everything awesome about the future, wrote a really cool book about our long-term survival as a species, and became captain of the good ship Gizmodo. We’re going to miss the hell out of her.

It’s almost impossible to choose a GIF to send her off with, and all manner of crying GIFS have been gone through. In the end I went with the following, because nothing says Annalee Newitz to me so much as a cat dressed as a shark riding atop a robot.